“We are investing in resilient and sovereign technologies.” Paolo Ardoino talks to Atlas21 about the development of peer-to-peer technologies, the progress of Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador, and future plans.
9 November marked the end of Adopting Bitcoin, El Salvador’s conference now in its third consecutive year, after the Central American country became the first in the world to declare bitcoin legal tender in 2021.
During the second day of the Salvadoran conference, on 8 November, a video was shown in which Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex – which together with Galoy organised the event – and Ceo of Tether, hinted that he wanted to find a way to improve the communication infrastructure via satellite connection. At the same time, Holepunch announced that important news in the development of peer-to-peer technologies will be announced on 14 February 2024.
What are you planning to announce? Something like a peer-to-peer Starlink?
We’re assembling puzzle pieces for resilient connections. One of the scariest things in life is not being able to talk to your family and friends, either because of censorship or geopolitical events. We want to create tools that allow people to stay connected in the most direct form possible. We believe that data centers will be weaponized in the future. Information is far more important than physical armies in warfare. Every country should own and uphold the information of its own citizens rather than having the information of their citizens held by another foreign country. We’re investing in technologies for countries to be more resilient, independent, and sovereign.
So the answer is yes? Will it be a Holepunch powered satellite connection?
Well, there could be a satellite…
Do you plan to release Keet’s open-source code?
We’re launching the Peer platform on February 14, 2024, which is what powers Keet, enabling everyone to build Keet. We don’t want people to just take Keet and change the logo 15 times. We want to guide people towards creating their own Keet-like innovations, disrupting centralized services.
Speaking of centralized services, has Tether ever been involved in the development of the Chivo wallet?
No, we weren’t. We were asked to help initially, but there were other companies already aiding in that. I think Chivo Wallet’s evolution should be something like Keet, with a wallet inside, so that in a simple application you will have freedom of speech and financial freedom.
How do you rate the state of Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador?
Some mainstream media are suggesting that the adoption is low. The thing that they always forget is that it took 15 years for the debit and credit cards to be accepted in the most banked country in the world, that is Switzerland, while the Bitcoin Law was announced 2 years ago. We all know that technology takes time. As bitcoiners, we are not pushing Bitcoin down the throat of everyone. We want people to understand the technology.
The lack of Bitcoin education in El Salvador has often been the focus of criticism. To what extent are you willing to invest in education?
We are ready to invest millions of dollars. This year’s conference was quite exciting because I had the opportunity to meet Mi Primer Bitcoin and Torogoz Dev, groups that have two different educational goals. Mi Primer Bitcoin provides education that is easily understandable by everyone. If you are a taxi driver or if you are selling pupusas you can use their courses to understand why Bitcoin is important and how you could use it in your own business. Torogoz Dev is a group of developers that is trying to expand the knowledge of Bitcoin among other developers, making sure that the development community in El Salvador understands how to set up a Bitcoin node, how to operate a Lightning Network node, how to develop on Bitcoin and Lightning.
And this is only in El Salvador, but we want to participate in other projects. In Georgia we partnered with two universities. We are trying to do the same in Nigeria. We organised the Plan B Summer School in Lugano. I think the PlanB Forum itself can be seen as an educational event. At the PlanB Forum in Lugano we announced the PlanB Network with Giacomo Zucco. We are not investing in Bitcoin education to make money out of it, But that’s the way to have a global community thriving and ensuring that this currency will be accepted faster by everyone. I think it’s clear to everyone that the geopolitical situation and macroeconomic situation in the world is worsening by the day. I don’t believe we have decades for people to understand Bitcoin. It’s important that people start using Bitcoin as their lifeline.
Back in June, Tether announced its participation in the $1 billion round for the mining farm Volcano Energy. When will the plant become operational?
The building of solar, wind and geothermal infrastructure will start at the same time but building solar and wind is faster thandrilling one kilometer holes in the soil. We expect to have the first solar plants in 2024 and to start with geothermal by 2025/2026.
And what is the status of Volcano Bonds?
When the Volcano Bond was announced, the aim was to do exactly what Volcano Energy is doing. Volcano Energy is now the Volcano Bond, but it will become an equity offering rather than being a bond and there are two reasons for that. One is that, when Volcano Bonds were announced, interest rates on T-bills were basically zero. Now they are at almost 6%. The price of a non-State bond would be much higher. The second reason is that the feedback that we got was that there is a ton of demand for investing, but people want to invest in something that is durable. A bond will be repaid, and that is not super exciting. People want to invest in building renewable energy infrastructure. So, purchasing a stock has a much bigger time span than bonds.
Will Volcano Energy’s shares be tradable on Bitfinex from 2024?
Yes, that is the plan. The aim is to make it available as soon as we start achieving some visible results. We are pretty close to that, then the equity offering will be available.
Bitfinex also invests in Bitcoin development, for example on that of RGB. The RGB use case will bring a lot of market demand for altcoins into Bitcoin. Is its goal to bring USDT (the world’s most capitalized stablecoin, managed by Tether) into Bitcoin?
Yes, I want USDT to be traded on RGB. My goal is not to bring the entire altcoin market to Bitcoin. Also, because that would be impossible. The reason for that is 99.9% of the altcoin advocates and builders will not bring anything to Bitcoin. The cool thing about RGB is that it removes the excuse to have yet another token that is powering a blockchain. RGB will be peer-to-peer, extremely scalable, cheap, and secure. People that are serious and want to create a token that has a sense should create it on RGB. There will be no point in using other blockchains. I’m interested in creating real-world utility for loyalty points, stablecoins or commodity-backed assets. You never heard me saying: “Well, we want to be the most used product in Web3, GameFi, and DeFi.” We don’t care. We think that 99.9% of the people have bigger and other problems than the Web3 bubble, and so we will need to serve them.
Also, I think RGB can help the security budget. The more halvings, the less fees from payouts of blocks, the more the need for creating on-chain transactional interests. Bitcoin is the strongest settlement layer humanity has ever had. People will use Bitcoin as a store of value, as basically their account, and might use USDT as their checking account. So, they can use USDT for small payments and keep saving in Bitcoin. That is, I think, where humanity will be going.
